280707 Khua Din bus station

Some photos from 030807 included in this post.

Conical hats = heavily laden vendors making their endless rounds of waiting passengers:






Can be hard to come across anything infrastructure-related in Laos that wasn't donated by some foreign government/NGO:



Photos by K-san



Tyre reincarnated as garbage receptacle:


Photo by K-san

Tagging cargo for the Lao-Thai international bus:





There were quite a few red passports among the maroon (Thai) & blue (Lao) ones on our bus.

On 030807, another red passport spotted - the NTUC Fairprice plastic bag national icon is a dead giveaway:




Tuktuk drivers swarmed around the rest of the red passports from our Udon Thani-Vientiane bus & closed in for the kill:


Photo by K-san

There must be something about huge backpacks that scream out 'rich pickings'. Helped them negotiate something acceptable to both parties.

K-san & the cat found their own tuktuk driver, who brought them to Tuktuk-land along Rue Gallieni (the section between IE201-202 on this map):




Photos by K-san

Mahosot-Fa Ngum junction:


Photo by K-san

280707 Friendship Bridge to Vientiane

Interruption to normal programming over. Back to the Vientiane 2007 trip.

Instead of animals like the lion (Singapore, Netherlands, UK, etc), tiger (Singapore & Malaysia), unicorn (UK), pelican (Barbados), leopard (Somalia), swordfish (Seychelles), parrot (St Lucia), antelope (Namibia), flamingo (Bahamas), elephant (Swaziland) & kangaroo & emu (Australia) as supporters on the national coat of arms...



...Laos has bundles of rice framing her national emblem, placing it among countries that favour plants instead e.g. her Communist counterparts Cuba (oak & laurel), China (rice & wheat), Vietnam (more rice) & North Korea (even more rice).

Where female immigration officers wear long olive green sinh:



Speaking of immigration officers - the cat had to wait for one multi-tasking guy to insert a 'non-original' CD of music files into his work computer & start copying them to the hard drive before he would process its passport & arrival card. Interesting to see one's passport details being keyed into the immigration department computer system with 'Copying...X.MP3 / From 'A' to 'B' / X Minutes Remaining' & the animation of white files flying out from left yellow folder into right yellow folder in the Windows progress dialog box in the background :P

Through bus windows in need of a good wipe - duty-free shops at the Lao side of the Friendship Bridge:



Photos taken on 03 Aug 2007

The cat learnt that 'Hair-flon' is the Lao transliteration of the American cosmetic/skincare product brandname Revlon :P

Along Tha Deua Road from the Friendship Bridge to Vientiane city centre:





Photos taken on 03 Aug 2007



Been a long time since the cat has enjoyed the sight of lush green rainy season rice fields. In recent years all trips to areas where rice is cultivated have been during the dry season. Took a while before it realised/remembered that all those large oval-ish depressions in the mud that it saw beside the Udon Thani-Nong Khai highway were made by water buffalos lying down...one of those useless little bits of childhood observations filed away somewhere in the cat's brain.





First impressions of Vientiane - rice fields, roadworks, garment factories...like a much dustier version of what's on the opposite bank of the Mekong, albeit with much fewer private vehicles (apart from motorbikes), concrete being mixed by hand-operated machines instead of concrete mixer trucks, plus a big fat Beer Lao factory...